Category Archives: Random thoughts

I used to love writing. I enjoyed it. I was told I had the knack for it. You’re a natural, they said.

Expressing ideas and emotions on white space wasn’t hard. Writing was an avenue for suppressed feelings, which I had to let out occasionally – err, most of the time. Writing was bliss. Words just effortlessly fall into place. I could finish an essay in just an hour or two. Easy breezy.

I used to love writing.

Until, I lost interest.

My job requires too many tasks on management and logistics. Not enough writing tasks as I had wanted. It isn’t entirely part of the job description I was told. I had less time for writing or reading.

Rust. I feel my brain rusting, slowly biting the inside of my skull. Words are starting to disappear. I can’t even construct a sentence that doesn’t seem report-ish.

My writing isn’t as fluent as it used to be. I used to effortlessly fill the blank spaces of the paper with black ink. I had it. But I was told I lost it. I don’t know if it’s still there.

How have you been? It’s been a while since our last conversation. Almost a year since I saw you.

I know you’ve been to the places we used to dream about – Greece, Italy, Paris. You’re seeing the world, enjoying life. I am immensely proud of how far you have reached. I know you will be achieving more in the next years. I am certain of that.

I want you to succeed. Remember? I used to tell you how much I wanted us to reach our dreams, side by side. But the world isn’t a wish-granting factory. It is heart-breaking we won’t make it together, as originally planned.

I will always cherish the six years. We’ve grown so much since. We learned to value compromise and trust. Prayer kept us strong. We felt invincible.

But nothing is permanent. With that growth, we fell apart. I tried to hold on but it was already too toxic. And I knew you felt the same. Letting go was a wise decision.

You’re going to reach a point when you’ve had enough. When your fire is muted, each small piece of coal having abandoned its orange glow, settling into the sea of dark gray matter. At some point, your fight will leave you. You’ll wrap your arms around your knees and hug so tightly, holding yourself together when you so desperately want to fall apart.

There’s going to be a time you unravel, come apart at the seams, and puddle loosely on the hardwood floor that hasn’t been swept since St. Patrick’s Day of last year.

There’s going to be a time when you feel like you’re not doing your best work. When you feel like you’re not being your best self. When you sit in the silence and think about what can change, picking at your cuticles and feeling like you’re wasting time. Contemplating an early wake…

It will start slowly, the way these things often do. It won’t feel slow; in fact, it will seem sudden — you’ll wake up and look over at the space next to you and think that something must have snapped in the night. But it didn’t happen there. It couldn’t have. You’ve long since abandoned the possibility that anything could happen in your sleep.

It will happen in the absence, in the nights they spent with their friends and you with yours. It’s good for you, you’ll rationalize. Everyone needs to spend some time apart. But time apart can tear you apart if you’re not careful, and slowly you will forget how to stitch yourself back together, how to return at the end of the day and fit yourself back into the crook of their neck, into the space between their arm and body like you never even left…

There is a specific feeling which exists only when you run into someone you had long forgotten about. It’s probably most palpable when it’s an ex, but it can happen with friends who were once particularly close. It is comparable to a scab that seems to have been on your skin forever — a scrape which was once quite painful but has been so long in the healing process that you no longer notice its presence when you wash over it in the shower. You peel it off almost out of boredom and suddenly there is a drop or two of blood, something that vaguely resembles the wound it once was, now too distant to really cause any discomfort. These people are wounds which have healed over, which have never quite turned into scars but which have become just another part of your lived-in body.